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Friday, January 14, 2011

The Council Has Spoken..Progressive Bar-B-Cue Edition!


The nation has had an interesting week, has it not? And this week's Watchers Council vote was no less interesting, mainly focused as it was on the tragic events in Tucson and their highly instructive aftermath, as the Left and their allies in the media decided not to let a good crisis go to waste and attempted to blame one man's insane actions on the usual targets - Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, the Tea party, and talk radio.

Unfortunately for them, the country didn't buy it, largely because they tried to draw water from that well one too many times in the past. Instead, it backfired and turned into a real donkey roast, as many of the entries this week document.

We ended up with a tie this week in the Council category this week.

Joshuapundit's The Constitution War focused on our Constitution and the reading of it in Congress becoming an issue. And as I pointed out, there are apparently a number of Democrats who find our Constitution not particularly worthy of veneration, even to the point of linking the mere reading of it to the Tucson shootings and calling for talk radio and political discourse to be censored...ironic since Gabrielle Giffords, one of the few Democrats who accepted the GOP's invitation to take part read the First Amendment.

My piece attempted to show why they feel that way, why they are dead wrong, (if we're still permitted to use that phrase)and why John Boehner and the Republicans were entirely right about the Constitution needing to be read right now.

Bookworm Rooms' scintillating piece, Progressives live in the past when it comes to shaping the message focused on how 'Progressives' tried to use the same old tactics they've used in the past successfully to milk the Tucson tragedy and lay it at the feet of their political opponents in a modern version of Orwell's ten minute hate.

Only this time, as Bookworm points out, they failed because they don't control all the information sources the way they used to:

The Dems are now proving that they also live in the past when it comes to their understanding about their ability to control the message. They speak as if this is 1995, an era in which only a relatively small number of America’s more sophisticated citizens were joining the geeks who had access to that weird thing called “electronic mail.” The World Wide Web had moved beyond being just a gleam in AlBore’s eye, but few citizens looked to it for news. Mostly, the WWW was a kind of cool way to try to make hotel reservations in foreign countries. The phrase “social networking” was more than a decade away. The traditional media was still the only game in town.

In this bygone era, the old media’s hegemony was almost total. Not only did it own the airwaves and the ink presses, but its management and its employees marched in lockstep. Their man was in the White House, and they controlled the message. The only fly in the ointment was that icky talk radio, especially that outspoken Rush Limbaugh, but they were confident that they could use their consolidated power and their total message control to disarm anything Rush had to say.

In this environment, spin was so easy. Their President touted the party line — the Oklahoma tragedy occurred because of Rush and his ilk — and they won the debate, such as it was. Nobody could get on the computer and hunt up old headlines and stories putting the lie to the media narrative. Okay, that’s not quite true. Maybe a few people who could afford the high cost of a Nexis search could but, even if they could get the information, they had no way to disseminate it.

This is still the world in which the current crop of Democratic/Progressive dreamers live. Immediately in the wake of news about the Tucson tragedy, the Progressives swung into action. “It’s all Sarah Palin’s fault, because she used cross hair imagery in her ads.” “It’s all the Tea Partiers’ fault, because they are so angry.” “It’s all Rush Limbaugh’s fault because . . . well, he’s Rush, and it’s always his fault.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the MSM’s planned political massacre: the new media.

As per our arcane bylaws, I put on my Watcher's hat, cast the tie breaking vote and Bookworm Room's superb piece is this weeks' winner.

As it happens, our non-Council winner was Michelle Malkin for The progressive “climate of hate:” An illustrated primer, 2000-2010 an exhaustive cataloging of every crisis and tragedy th eLeft has attempted to milk for political capital over the last decade - remember protest signs like 'Bush, the only dope worth shooting'? Ahh the nostalgia!

Here are this week’s full results:

Council Winners


Non-Council Winners



See you next week!






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